Being The Good Soldier
by Savendia
Summary: While Sam rebelled, Sam argued, and Sam left, Dean stood dry-eyed and straight-backed behind his father and waited for the next command.


So, I just (as in, just this week just) started watching Supernatural, even though I'd promised myself I would wait until I was done with the X-Files. Well, I guess I'm not much for promises, because it's four days out and I've already seen the first half of season 1. I'm in love. And all I can do with my love is write fanfiction...*sob*

This is short, like everything else I write. But I'm trying to get up the courage to write a really long story, and I have high hopes for a Supernatual novella, or at least a crossover. (Imagine it - Mulder and Scully meet Sam and Dean... And maybe Olivia Dunham and Peter and Walter Bishop while I'm at it.) Call this a warm up.

Disclaimer: I don't own Sam and Dean. Yet. But they've been promised to me in return for reviews - every review you leave goes that much further to the boys being mine! Don't you think they need the big hug I so desperately want to give them?;D

And the car. They're also gonna let me have the car. :p

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Dean was always the good little soldier. While Sam was off "being normal," Dean was the one watching his dad's back, always ready with extra salt or extra matches or an extra set of hands. While a high-school Sam was arguing about soccer, Dean obediently practiced his marksmanship. While a tiny Sam screamed and sobbed, a terrified Dean swallowed his fear and carried his baby brother to safety as the house burned around him. Because Dad had told him to.

While Sam rebelled, Sam argued, and Sam left, Dean stood dry-eyed and straight-backed behind his father and waited for the next command.

He'd gotten good at being his Dad's little soldier. He asked no questions, expected no answers, and followed every order to the letter. Dad always had a reason. They were saving lives by destroying the evil that imbued the world; surely there was no place for argument in that? It was a bold and necessary mission. Dangerous, but someone had to walk in the shadows for others to play in the light. Dad never had a problem being that person, so Dean didn't either.

Sam did, and Sam was gone.

Sam didn't understand. He thought he could hide himself away in the seething mass of normality that was the rest of the world. He asked questions, he challenged the very basis that Dean's life was built on. And when he didn't get the answers he wanted, he left, so he could pretend he'd never asked the questions in the first place.

He didn't understand that he'd left Dad and Dean the sole keepers of the normality he craved.

Maybe Sam didn't understand. But that didn't make it okay. It didn't make him right.

Dean knew a lot about "right." He knew life wasn't fair, and it wasn't right that innocent people died, or got hurt, or that Dad got hurt. But he also knew that by being the good little soldier, he was helping to make the world just that much more safe for those innocents and for Dad, and that was right.

Dean liked things to be right, because he knew just how wrong life could be. He was twenty-six years old. He should have graduated college and gotten a job, a serious girlfriend, an apartment with a fish tank in the corner and the same warm bed, every night.

Instead, he was lucky to stretch out in the backseat of the Impala with a rolled-up sweatshirt as a pillow and no ghosts out for his blood. If he was really lucky, there was a motel room and perhaps the cheap waitress from whatever diner he'd gotten a cheap dinner from. But after the girl left with a giggle and an entreatment to call, it was just him alone again, waiting for his father to show up with new orders. Sometimes, it was days before John Winchester sauntered back into Dean's life, bruised, bloody and ornery, triumphant with single-handed success and flushed with the prospect of a new hunt.

John never once considered that Dean wouldn't be there. Dean hated being left behind and John knew it. But Dean was the good little soldier, and he never once considered not being there for his father to return to. Orders were orders, and though they might be related Dean and Sam stood in very different courts when it came to obedience.

Sam wanted his freedom; Dean couldn't fault his brother that. It wasn't Sam's fault that he didn't see the intrinsic _wrongness _to the world, a wrongness that seeped into everything and everyone, slowly and silently leeching the good from them. Dean did see it, just like Dad saw it. And just like his dad, he yearned to right it.

If that meant spending his days hunting ghosts in old buildings, chasing monsters through the sewers of a blissfully ignorant city and being chased, in turn, by the blissfully ignorant law enforcement of that city, if it meant living out of his car, running scams against the same innocents he sought to protect just to buy a burger and some gas, if it meant spending his whole life one step behind his father, it was worth it. To make the world right.

If being the good little soldier could bring even a little more rightness to the things that were wrong, then there was no choice. Orders were orders, and disobedience cost more than lives.


End file.
